A health and fitness blog based out of Fredonia, NY

Tag Archives: mother nature

As an assignment, we had to ask a classmate to do a guest blog post on our own blogs. My friend Anne, who has an awesome blog about conservation and sustainability, was nice enough to write a post for me! Check it out below, let us know what you think, and take a look at her blog, here!

SustainableFred.wordpress.com

As a college student, I am no stranger to eating on the go. Over the past few decades, we have changed as a culture. Some of us don’t even leave our cars for dinner and many meals are consumed outside of the home.

In a previous post, I mentioned Mark Hyman, MD as he wrote a blog for the Huffington Post on food sustainability. Hyman warns in his post that not only are our convenience food practices not good for the earth, but for our health as well. He says, “One hundred years ago all we ate was local, organic food — grass-fed, real, whole food. There were no fast food restaurants, there was no junk food, there was no frozen food — there was just what your mother or grandmother made. Most meals were eaten at home. Now, one in five breakfasts is from McDonald’s and 50 percent of meals are eaten outside the home.”

We must remember that it is not too late to change. Our packaged, factory farmed food is a fairly new practice, and above all we must remember that we made our world this way. So we must take it upon ourselves to change again. We are not separate from our environment, we are undoubtedly linked to our surroundings. Food sustainability is not only important for our planet, but for our bodies as well.

Hyman explains, “Broccoli, peaches, almonds, kidney beans, and other whole foods don’t need a food ingredient label or bar code, but for some reason these foods — the foods we co-evolved with over millennia — had to be “improved” by Food Science. As a result, the processed food industry and industrial agriculture have changed our diet, decade by decade, not by accident but by intention.”

He also argues that while most Americans say that they do not have time or do not know how to cook, most will spend more time watching cooking shows than actually cooking.

As a fast past society, we must take a step back. We need to eat in more, carve out time for preparing our own meals. Skip the high calorie, nutritionally low to-go food. The best way we can respect the earth, is to respect what it produces. As Hyman says, “The earth will survive our self-destruction, but we may not.”